Composers and Performers, Together as Creators

Most composers will tell you that knowing the performers they are writing for makes all the difference, and that letting the musicians in on the composing process can foster fresh ideas and help avoid technical pitfalls.

The soprano Dawn Upshaw and the composer Osvaldo Golijov have worked together on several of Mr. Golijov’s major works, and as part of Carnegie Hall’s important Professional Training Workshops series, they joined forces to show 8 composers and 18 singers how it’s done. The collaborations began at Bard College in October, and the finished works were presented at Zankel Hall on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon.

By design, to judge from Ms. Upshaw’s and Mr. Golijov’s introductory comments, the composers represented a broad range of styles, although several learned a thing or two from Mr. Golijov about melding international folk and pop accents into classical forms.

Lev Zhurbin, a k a Ljova, whose “Niña Dance” opened the Saturday concert, used bright Tex-Mex-inflected trumpet figures to frame a gripping cycle about the hundreds of young women who have disappeared (or been found murdered) in Juárez, Mexico, since 1993.

But the Mexican accent was just the first of many signposts. Mr. Zhurbin also used tango rhythms and a Weillian darkness. Sofia Rei Koutsovitis sang the haunting texts (by Marjorie Agosin and Saúl Yurkievich) movingly in a vibrato-free pop style.

Jeremy Flowers’s “Three Songs” — settings of William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop poems — were also written for a pop voice and had a powerful advocate in Olga Bell, who moved from a whisper to a shout as the score demanded. Supported by low strings, guitar, piano, drums and pitched percussion, as well as Mr. Flowers’s own electronics, these chamber-pop pieces would have been at home on a late-1960s art-rock album. But they are also part of an affectingly direct hybrid style that many young composers favor now.

Photo

Professional Training Workshops: The program, at Zankel Hall, featured, right, from left, Megan Taylor, Mary Bonhag, Tania Rodriguez, Patrick Cook and Sung Eun Lee in a work by David T. Little.Credit
Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

Paola Prestini chose a handful of anonymous Italian texts that examine feminine archetypes — virgin, martyr, mother and queen — in her “Oceanic Verses,” and set them for two sopranos (Leona Carney and Rie Miyake) and a mezzo-soprano (Katarzyna Sadej). Ms. Prestini’s singers use vibrato and traditional expressive techniques most of the time, but the music draws on Italian folk styles and it is sometimes rendered using the plain, gritty vocal sound in which the music is rooted.

Russian folk songs inspired Elena Langer’s hauntingly modal, eerily scored “Songs at the Well,” for two sopranos (Ariadne Greif and Rachel Schutz). Ms. Langer’s innovation was to assemble her songs into a poignant drama about a young woman’s increasingly unsatisfactory marriage.

Other works had a dramatic underpinning too. David T. Little’s project was the start of an opera, “Dog Days,” based on a short story by Judy Budnitz, in which a family in postapocalyptic survival mode descends (or in some cases resists descending) into barbarism. Mr. Little’s writing is melodic and shapely, and the five singers — Mary Bonhag and Megan Taylor, sopranos; Tania Rodriguez, mezzo-soprano; Patrick Cook and Sung Eun Lee, tenors — gave wrenching portrayals of a couple and their three children.

Matti Kovler’s “Here Comes Messiah!” — a monodrama, in some onomatopoetic detail, about giving birth — was sung, spoken, whispered and breathed, heavily, by Tehila Goldstein, an agile soprano. It, too, had a folk touch: its ending is a graceful setting of “Peliah,” a Hasidic song based on a Psalm text.

Judd Greenstein’s “Vayomer Shlomo” (“And Solomon Said”) weaves together three biblical texts by or about Solomon (from Kings, Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes) into a meditation on the nature of wisdom. Mr. Greenstein’s sharply rhythmic setting of the Hebrew text (with brief passages in English) at the start, and the clapping figures at the end, seemed to be pointed allusions to Steve Reich, but mostly Mr. Greenstein went his own consonant and sometimes modal, rhythmically complex way. The piece was performed by a finely balanced vocal trio: Solange Merdinian, mezzo-soprano, and Celine Mogielnicki and Madyson Page, sopranos.

Of the eight composers only Kate Soper, in “Helen Enfettered,” a setting of sections from Christian Bök’s “Eunoia,” veered toward the melodic angularity of the atonal style. Even so, as this peculiar fantasy about Helen of Troy unfolded, that angularity melted, yielding an increasingly lyrical piece for two sopranos, Melanie Conly and Jamie Van Eyck.

The works were performed by an expert chamber ensemble conducted by Alan Pierson.

Correction: May 14, 2009

A music review on Tuesday about a program of songs by eight composers at Zankel Hall misspelled the surname of the composer of “Helen Unfettered.” She is Kate Soper, not Sopor.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Composers and Performers, Together as Creators. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe